Play is the problem with 'Anyone Can Whistle'

Saturday

Jun 7, 2014 at 9:42 PMJun 8, 2014 at 11:17 AM

By Paul Kolas TELEGRAM & GAZETTE REVIEWER

WEST BOYLSTON — John Leslie deserves some kind of medal for resurrecting a show that was a monumental flop on Broadway 50 years ago. There's a valid reason why Stephen Sondheim and Arthur Laurents' "Anyone Can Whistle" closed after nine performances. Even Angela Landsbury, in her singing debut, couldn't save it from mostly negative reviews, and it's small wonder that audiences were baffled by a musical allegory that is an unwieldy marriage of "Our Town" and "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest." Sondheim's most ardent admirers will have a tough time placing "Anyone Can Whistle" on the same mantle with the likes of "Sweeney Todd," "Into the Woods," "Company," "Follies," "A Little Night Music," and "Sunday in the Park with George," although Lydian De Vere Yard and Todd Yard do their lovely best to hoist it up to shouting distance level.

It's a strange duck of a show, set in a fictitious western town that has gone bankrupt. The town's mayoress, Cora Hoover Hooper (Sally Holden), is a corrupt, conniving lady who can't stand the thought of being unpopular. Her obsequious cronies include Comptroller Schub (Ed Savage), Chief of Police Magruder (Gary Swanson) and Treasurer Cooley (Anthony Huntington). The town's only profitable source of income is by way of the local sanitarium, known as "The Cookie Jar," whose inmates look in better shape than the disgruntled, impoverished townspeople.

In order to placate them, and restore Cora's popularity by turning the town into a money-making tourist attraction, Schub installs a water pump inside a rock on the edge of town. The townspeople, conned into believing that Baby Joan Schroeder (Emma Earls) is responsible for the "curative water" that now flows from the rock, rejoice about it on "Miracle Song." When the sanitarium's skeptical nurse, Fay Apple (Lydian De Vere Yard), takes the Cookie Jar's 49 inmates ("Cookies") to test the rock's healing powers, Schub tries to stop Fay from discovering the truth. Chaos breaks out when the inmates and townspeople mix together and no one knows who is who.

Up to this point, you may feel equally confused by the directionless cacophony on display, the large cast milling around the stage like a herd of cattle, singing "I'm Like a Bluebird" with shrill dispatch. The acting by all, except the Yards, is deliberately hyperbolic, befitting the silent movie era, but Holden knows how to wink at the audience while doing it, investing atonal numbers like "Me and My Town," "Parade in Town," and "I've Got You to Lean On," with a sly, satirical touch underneath the cartoonish bombast. De Vere Yard brings rousing fervency to the hopeful "There Won't Be Trumpets," but it's when Todd Yard's mysterious J. Bowden Hapgood shows up, that Leslie's game production finally achieves some familiar Sondheim magic.

Without a doubt the Yard husband and wife team are the best thing about this revived "Anyone Can Whisper," making the playful courtship between Fay and Hapgood enormously charming, and unlike the jarring white noise surrounding them, scaled to exquisitely believable proportion. Their scenes together feel like a fully realized romantic interlude within the messy idea of a show surrounding them. "Come Play Wiz Me" is a true delight, De Vere Yard disguised in a blonde wig as a coquettish French girl, Todd Yard decked out in a debonair white coat. They also sing beautifully on the show's near-concluding "With So Little To Be Sure Of." Individually, De Vere Yard's "Anyone Can Whistle" and Todd Yard's "Everybody Says Don't" give further demonstration of their considerable vocal talent. It's a minor miracle that they and Leslie make this musical oddity work as well as it does.